‘Jessica Jones’ Recap, Episode 2: Pissed Off

Toward the end of “AKA Crush Syndrome,” we get our first real-time glimpse of Kilgrave, the psychopathic telepath/telepathic psychopath (played by Doctor Who himself, David Tennant) whose abduction and abuse of Jessica left her with PTSD and currently has her on a quest to stop him from ever doing it again. But it’s too late for the random family whose apartment he seizes, using his mind powers to make himself a welcome guest—and shove their children, for whom he has nothing but contempt, in a closet. “I have to go to the bathroom,” their daughter says. “Go in the closet,” he replies. That’s entertainment, I guess?

Superhero stories geared toward adults always run the risk of trying too hard to establish their serious-business bonafides. But that seemed wholly unnecessary for this series, which is so deeply tied to Jessica’s rape and trauma that there’s no need to take things over the top elsewhere. By this point in the episode, we’ve established that Kilgrave stole a man’s kidneys and left him a suicidal cripple between abducting and raping multiple women, recklessly hijacking the minds of countless people along the way. Did we really need to watch him make a terrified little girl piss her pants in a closet to get the message that he’s a piece of shit? The suffering of children is a tool in the artist’s arsenal not to be used lightly, and while it’s clear Jessica Jones is taking the trauma inflicted on victims of violence seriously, it’s less apparent that it knows not to gratuitously gild the lily.

Compare this to our first prolonged exposure to Daredevil’s big bad. When we meet Wilson Fisk, we already know he’s used his massive fortune—and his equally imposing physique—to seize control of New York City’s underworld and real-estate market alike. But instead of watching him throw his weight around (sorry), we see him awkwardly flirting with an art-gallery owner, first at an exhibition and then over dinner. This bold, mold-breaking choice humanized the supervillain in a way we’ve never seen a live-action superhero project attempt before. And the show stuck with it, too: While it never shied away from depicting the ugly brutality of Fisk’s gentrification plan, it also showed him to be a man with actual, honest-to-god friends, who cared about him as much as he cared about them. Ultimately, he and his gang were as much a surrogate family as Matt Murdock and friends, making the conflict between them that much more compelling. This is interesting, folks, and it made for a compelling, unpredictable hero-vs-villain narrative.

Making Kilgrave an unmitigated monster is a legit choice, don’t get me wrong—it’s not like I’m clamoring to see the softer side of a serial rapist—but it’s cutting off Jessica Jones from exploring a rich vein of character and story. Imagine Game of Thrones if, instead of complicated figures like the Lannisters, the Hound, and Stannis Baratheon, all the antagonists were raw uncut psychopaths like Ramsay Bolton, Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane, and those crazy bald cannibals from Season Four. Their thoroughly black hearts make them entertaining enemies, but it’d be tough to sustain the show without a bit more shading.

To Jessica Jones’ credit, it’s more willing to complicate its hero. When the cops tip Luke Cage off to the fact that she’d been taking surveillance photos of him, Jessica goes into cover-your-ass mode, claiming his fuck-buddy Gina’s husband (who he had no idea even existed) hired her. Luke then dutifully informs Gina her hubby’s on to her. Of course, this isn’t true at all—Jessica has been trailing the handsome barkeep because he’s connected to a woman named Reva Connors, whose death involved Kilgrave. So Gina winds up outing her own infidelity, fucking up her life and causing her husband and his rugby team (!) to head to the bar to try and fuck up Luke, all because Jessica tried to protect herself at their expense.

Something similar happens with the ambulance driver her investigation leads her to, the one who picked Kilgrave up at the scene of the accident and lost his kidneys to the creep for his troubles. The procedure caused a stroke that’s left him voiceless and housebound, permanently tied to a dialysis machine and at the mercy of his ultrareligious mother. So when Jessica comes calling, he writes her a message, and it isn’t “Kilgrave”—it’s “KILL ME.”

Jessica just leaves, horrified and devastated at the cost Kilgrave has exacted from the man’s life but unable to bring herself to grant his deathwish. Being a hero, even under the modest definition of trying to protect yourself and future victims from your own abuser, means there are some wrongs you’ll simply be unable to right, and others you may trigger along the way. It’s a smart point, though making it has thus far made for awfully dreary TV.

At least Jessica has a potential partner in crimefighting. When the big fight with Gina’s husband and his pals takes place at Luke’s bar, she’s surprised to discover that her superstrength is matched by her former one-night-stand’s seemingly immeasurable ability to take a punch—or a broken bottle.

The fight choreography the show developed for Cage is hilariously dismissive—the dude just contemptuously slaps people away, like he’s already well aware how this is gonna end and the time it’s taking to get there has left him pretty goddamn bored.

And when he sneaks into Jessica’s apartment at the end of the episode to confront her about their respective secret powers, we find out why:

“I’m unbreakable,” he tells her, with the saw to the abs to prove it. For someone like Jessica, struggling with the responsibility and guilt of how her situation has affected others, that’s just the kind of person she needs.